The Double Agents Read online

  Kappler made a sour face.

  “Come now, Juli. The German forces have only so many men and we’re losing what we have at a growing rate. If Hitler were planning to reinforce Sicily, why would he have us overseeing Sturmbannführer Müller’s work? And let me remind you what that professor from the university in Palermo said: that such weapons do not discriminate. That they are as likely to kill us as they are any enemy.”

  Schrader made eye contact, pursed his lips, and nodded. He returned to his leather chair, sat, and sipped at his coffee slowly and thoughtfully.

  He knew that Kappler was of course privy to all of the secret SS operations on Sicily and that these included Müller and the plans for chemical and biological weapons.

  For one, Kappler was the supervising officer of the SS major—Hans Müller, a high-strung twenty-eight-year-old with a violent temper matching, if not surpassing, that of Hitler—who was in charge of the Palermo SS field office and its operations.

  Near Palermo, in an ancient seaside villa, the SS was advancing the Nazi experimentation—begun in the Dachau concentration camp—of injecting Sicilian prisoners with extract from mosquito mucous glands to keep alive a strain of yellow fever. That was to say, until the sickened hosts died of malaria. Then new hosts—often members of the Mafia brought in from the penal colonies that had been established on tiny outer islands just north of Sicily—were infected with the disease that the SS had imported.

  For another, Kappler was aware—although Müller as yet was not—that shipments had begun of crates labeled SONDERKART.6LE.F.H.18 T83 that contained 10.5cm howitzer shells. These were not the usual ack-ack antiaircraft munitions for firing from the Nazi’s light field howitzers. These rounds contained the chemical agent code-named T83 that attacked the human central nervous system.

  Commonly called Tabun, the German-developed chemical was one of the easiest to produce on a massive scale and was efficient to a horrific level. Mostly odorless and colorless, it quickly caused its victims to have convulsions, restricted breathing, triggered loss of bowel control—and, ultimately, loss of heartbeat.

  Death by Tabun was relatively swift…but intensely painful and gruesome.

  Kappler knew that Müller was not aware of the Tabun munitions, nor that a first shipment was already in the Port of Palermo, aboard a cargo ship, mixed in with other military goods and listed on the manifest, more or less innocuously, by its code name.

  Müller did not know because Kappler had decided not to tell him until he thought it was necessary to do so.

  In short, Kappler had told Schrader, he did not trust the hothead with knowledge—let alone control—of such a powerful weapon and Schrader quietly had concurred.

  After a moment, Kappler asked, “What do you have to say about that, Juli?”

  Schrader leaned back in the leather chair, staring at the coffee cup, and with an index finger slowly rotated the cup on the saucer as he considered it all.

  How do I agree, Schrader thought, without encouraging Oskar to take one step too far, to act on a “different course” perhaps too soon?

  He sighed.

  “I will allow that what you say is conceivable—” he began.

  “Ach du leiber Gott!” Kappler flared. Dramatically, he raised his hands heavenward, palms up, and looked upward, as if seeking divine input. “Of course it is, Juli! And that is why I speak of this with you, my friend, so that wise men can make plans, not just be left twisting in the wind…a deadly, contaminated wind.”

  Standartenführer Julius Schrader looked exasperated.

  “Yes, yes, Oskar. So you have said. Yet you have not shared with me what these different courses of action might be.”

  Kappler approached the desk, then went to the coffee service and poured himself a cup. He started to pick up the cup, then, for some reason, decided otherwise.

  He buried his face in the palms of his hands, his fingertips massaging his temples. After a moment, he removed his hands, looked at Schrader, and quietly said, “I have also heard—from trusted sources other than those I have mentioned—that there are certain members of the SS who are setting up routes to safety should we not win this war. Routes for them, for their loved ones. And then there are other routes, ones that set aside their funds.”

  Schrader stared into Kappler’s eyes. After a long moment, his eyebrows went up.

  “Yes,” Schrader said. “I have heard of that, too.”

  Schrader leaned forward and placed his cup and saucer on the desktop. The fine clink that the porcelain made as it touched the polished marble seemed to echo in the silence of the large room.

  “I have also heard,” Schrader said, his tone quiet, his words measured, “that those caught making such plans—or even suspected of such—are being charged with treason…and so are being dealt with in a vicious fashion. And if you and I have heard of this ‘planning,’ then no doubt it is known to—”

  There was a faint rap at the door and both men turned quickly—and more than a little nervously—toward it.

  The massive, dark wooden door slowly swung open just enough for a boyish-looking young man—easily a teenager—in the uniform of an Italian naval ensign to step through. He stood at an awkward attention and saluted stiffly.

  Kappler noticed that the ensign’s uniform was mussed, that he had a crudely shorn haircut, and that his eyes appeared to be without thought.

  He doesn’t look old enough to shave, Kappler thought as he and Schrader absently returned the salute. He looks, in fact, like a very simple boy, one plunked off a farm…or maybe out of the shanties…and stuck in the first sailor suit they could find, never mind the fit or lack thereof.

  “Herr Standartenführer?” the young ensign said tentatively.

  “I am Standartenführer Schrader,” Schrader said with what Kappler thought was a touch too much authority. “Where is Tentente de Benedetto?”

  Italian navy Lieutenant Antonio de Benedetto—a fifty-five-year-old Sicilian, five foot two and one-eighty, with a sun-baked complexion as coarse as that of the volcanic rock of nearby Mount Etna—had two months earlier been recalled to the Regina Marina and there assigned to serve as the chief naval aide and liaison—and, it was strongly suspected, chief spy—to the Messina SS provisional headquarters.

  He of course had been neither requested nor needed, but the Italians insisted that they be allowed to properly serve their SS guests and comrades-in-arms. And so the squat Sicilian had become a fixture around the office.

  The young ensign looked uneasy and avoided eye contact with Standartenführer Julius Schrader by looking five feet over his head, to a point on the high wall near the portrait of Hitler. He still held his salute, though now it was not quite so stiff.

  “He is ill, Herr Standartenführer. I am Guardiamarina Mentesana. I was asked to take his desk today, as no one else was available.”

  Christ! Kappler thought. They send us children and old men to fight a war!

  “Guardiamarina Mentesana,” Standartenführer Julius Schrader said stiffly. “Did anyone, perhaps even Tentente de Benedetto, inform you that you are to wait to be admitted after you knock at the door? That you do not simply knock and then enter?”

  Guardiamarina Mentesana’s eyes, still fixed on a point on the wall five feet above Standartenführer Schrader’s head, suddenly grew wider.

  “No, Herr Standartenführer. I was not so informed.”

  As if suddenly remembering he was still saluting, he quickly brought down his hand, then held out a folded sheet of paper as he walked to the desk.

  “This message just came in, Herr Standartenführer. It is marked ‘Urgent’ for you. I thought I should deliver it immediately, and that is why—”

  “Danke,” Standartenführer Schrader said, taking the paper. “That will be all.”

  “Yes, Herr Standartenführer.”

  Guardiamarina Mentesana saluted, turned on his heels, and marched back to the door, then went through it.

  When the door was pulled closed,
Kappler said what he was thinking: “That’s what we can expect to repel the enemy? Children? It is bad enough that the Italian men are ill equipped and poorly trained. What can we possibly expect of their children?”

  Schrader was unfolding the sheet of paper as he replied, “Never underestimate the effectiveness of youth, my friend. I seem to recall a young man at university who, time and again, rode polo ponies into battles.”

  Kappler snorted.

  “Battle?” he began. “I seem to recall that the teams were reasonably evenly matched, and that we shot wooden balls, not bullets.” When he saw Schrader’s expression change dramatically, he said, “What? What is that about?”

  “It’s from Müller.”

  “Müller? Why is he not messaging me?”

  “He reports explosions from unknown causes,” Schrader said as he calmly refolded the sheet and held it out to Kappler, “and felt that I should be directly made aware of them. According to this, protocol would appear to be the least of our worries….”

  As Kappler took the sheet, he muttered, “The bastard.”

  He scanned the message.

  “Schiest!”

  He looked at Schrader, then said more softly, “The Tabun?”

  Schrader nodded just perceptibly.

  “Berlin won’t be pleased that we allowed this to happen,” Schrader said.

  Kappler didn’t reply for a moment. Then he said: “Worse. If word gets out that we have a nerve agent, and thus there are plans to use it, Churchill may make good on his threat to retaliate in kind….”

  “I believe it was the American President Roosevelt who said that,” Schrader offered.

  “Churchill, Roosevelt—does it matter?”

  Kappler saw in Schrader’s eyes that he clearly understood the ramifications of that.

  “No,” Schrader said. “Of course not. You should leave for Palermo at once, Oskar. Take whatever and whomever you think necessary. Report back as soon as you can.”

  [TWO]

  37 degrees 51 minutes 01 seconds North Latitude 11 degrees 13 minutes 05 seconds East Longitude Strait of Sicily Aboard theCasabianca1025 26 March 1943

  “Commander, there is absolutely no question in my mind that that cargo ship had to be a total loss,” United States Army Air Forces Major Richard M.Canidy said, his dark eyes intense. “I used enough Composition C-2 to blow up a vessel damn near twice its size. What’s not clear is what kind of”—he paused, glancing at the ceiling as he mentally searched for an appropriate description—“secondary destruction was caused by the cloud created from the Tabun burning in the hold.”

  Commander Jean L’Herminier, chief officer of the Free French Forces submarine Casabianca, nodded. There was no mistaking the human horror that was meant by the nerve agent’s “secondary destruction.”

  The two were meeting in private in the commander’s small office, just two hatches down from the control room. The ninety-two-meter-long Agosta-class sub, submerged to a depth of ninety meters and cruising under battery power at a speed of eight nautical miles an hour, was en route to Algiers, Algeria, from the northwestern tip of Sicily. The executive officer had the helm for this leg, the last on what for the Casabianca promised to become a regular route for covert missions in the Mediterranean Sea.

  The commander’s dimly lit, drab-gray office held little more than bare essentials—a metal desktop, three metal chairs, and a framework on one wall with navigation charts of the Mediterranean. The desktop, which doubled as a plotting table, had two collapsible legs on one end and, on the other, was attached to the wall by a long hinge so that the top could be folded up flat and out of the way.

  Canidy sat on one side of the desktop, in one of two armless metal chairs; across from him, in the single metal chair that had arms, was L’Herminier, now leaning back with his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced.

  At five foot seven and maybe one-forty, the thirty-five-year-old L’Herminier—who carried himself with a soft-spoken confidence—comfortably fit the room’s tight surroundings, as would be expected of such a seasoned submariner.

  Not nearly at ease in the tight confines, however, was Canidy, whose big bones and wide shoulders on a six-foot frame made the twenty-six-year-old seem somewhat like the proverbial bull in the china shop. And Canidy’s energy right now—intense, smoldering just under the surface—did little to diffuse that impression.

  L’Herminier knew that while Canidy carried authentic papers stating he was a major in the USAAF, Canidy was in fact with the Office of Strategic Services. Since mid-December, L’Herminier had also been working for the organization; the Casabianca was serving as a spy delivery vehicle.

  I know little about Canidy, the commander thought, but I like him. And my gut tells me that, until he proves himself otherwise, he is a man of his word.

  The admiration was mutual.

  For one, Major Canidy knew what Commander L’Herminier had done just four months earlier. Many people knew—including the Nazis, if not Hitler himself—as it had become damn near legendary.

  On November 27, 1942, as Nazi Germany carried out the personal orders of its furious leader to retaliate against Vichy France for its cooperation with the Allies in the taking of North Africa—Operation Torch—the German SS raided the southern France port of Toulon in an attempt to capture the French fleet there.

  The French had ordered those vessels to be scuttled.

  Dozens of ships were burned and sunk at their moorings. But—against odds, not to mention against orders of the admiralty of Vichy France—L’Herminier commanded his crew to dive. As the Casabianca came under enemy cannon fire, she made way for Algiers.

  There, in newly liberated North Africa, the captain and crew of the somewhat-new submarine (it had been launched not quite seven years earlier, in February 1935) joined the Free French Forces.

  L’Herminier’s brave act had been a remarkable one in that it at once saved the warship from either destruction or falling into the hands of the Nazis and preserved it and her skilled crew for use against the Axis powers.

  Canidy’s admiration of L’Herminier also came from personal experience with the commander, whom he found to be a real professional.

  When Canidy had first approached the submariner with the vague outline of his proposed mission in Sicily and his request to be inserted by sub, L’Herminier quickly had said, “Consider it done.”

  It had been no problem in large part because, shortly after joining the Allies, Commander L’Herminier had begun doing something very similar to what Canidy requested.

  On December 14, 1942—only weeks after fleeing Toulon—Commander L’Herminier had maneuvered the Casabianca just off shore of Corsica, the Axis-occupied French island in the upper Mediterranean Sea.

  The sub carried her complement of four officers and fifty-plus men. Also on board: two teams of OSS agents.

  Using the method that L’Herminier himself had developed for the secret landing of spies, he carefully surveyed the coast by periscope, found an area suitable for putting ashore a small boat, then slipped the sub back out to sea, flooded its ballast, and sat on the bottom of the Mediterranean till dark.

  Under cover of night, L’Herminier then returned the submarine to within a mile of the position he had found on the shoreline, and, with the sub’s deck just barely awash so as to keep a low profile from enemy patrols, ordered the launching of a dinghy.

  A pair of Casabianca crewmen, armed with Sten 9mm submachine guns, then rowed ashore the first team of three OSS men. They carried with them equipment (machine guns, pistols, ammunition, wireless radios) and money (several thousand Italian lire, a million French francs).

  After the OSS team began to make its way inland, the crewmen rowed back to the sub, and then the sub returned to her spot on the sea bottom to await a second insertion.

  Thirty hours later, the last of the OSS spies and supplies were ashore.

  And nine days after that, PEARL HARBOR, the code name for the clandestine wireless radio s
tation, sent a message in Morse code to OSS Algiers Station—and became the first OSS team to successfully transmit intel from inside enemy-controlled Europe.

  Henceforth, on a daily basis, the W/T (wireless telegraphy) link relayed order of battle information on the Italians and Germans to an OSS control in Algiers. This intel was then decrypted and forwarded across town to Allied Forces Headquarters, where it came to be enthusiastically embraced—and helped to establish the fledgling OSS as a bona fide supplier of enemy intel in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO).

  As historic and reaching as the mission had been, however, it had not been without error. During the second insertion of OSS agents, the dinghy had capsized and its two sailors had become stranded on the island with the agents.

  It wasn’t exactly a disastrous turn of events—the crewmen were, after all, French and thus could assimilate, and, it was expected, aid the agents—but it certainly had not been planned.

  The Casabianca found that it had no option but to return to Algiers, where plans were drawn up for another mission to Corsica that would serve to rescue the two crewmen and resupply the OSS teams.

  In the course of such planning, Dick Canidy’s request came up, and Commander L’Herminier had voiced his opinion of the mission.

  “It would only be a bit of a detour to and from Corsica,” L’Herminier had said. “Consider it done.”

  The new plan thus called for Commander L’Herminier to put Canidy ashore on Sicily, exactly as L’Herminier had put the OSS teams on Corisca—with the hopeful exception of dunking him in the drink—and then continue on to Corsica, where the sub would resupply the teams there and collect the pair of stranded sailors.

  Canidy, meanwhile, was to locate a professor from the University of Palermo who had great expertise in metallurgy—and whose skills were a critical asset to any country with an interest in the development of advanced weaponry—and convince him that it was in his best interests to leave Sicily with Canidy.